Doug Hastings, Chair of the firm's Board of Directors and a Member of the Firm in the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the Washington, DC, office, wrote an article titled "Pioneer ACOs Year One: On the Path to a Learning Health Care System."

Following is an excerpt:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services yesterday announced results from the first performance year of the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization Model. The Pioneer Model should be seen as part of a crucial phase of testing alternative payment and delivery models in an effort to achieve greater value in health care. One year's results should not be seen as a definitive outcome or leading to a dispositive conclusion, but rather as a valuable source for learning.

The Pioneers represent 32 of over 425 public and private market ACOs reportedly in operation nationally. The two-sided risk model they assume is more advanced than the shared-savings-only approach of the Medicare Shared Savings Program Track 1 and most commercial ACO arrangements, but less advanced from a full risk perspective than many capitated provider arrangements in place around the country. All of these efforts bring greater definitional clarity to accountable care and accountable care organizations. ...

ACO skeptics clearly remain. Among the doubts and cautions that have been raised are that ACOs will drive insufficient change in physician behavior and patient engagement, result in insufficient savings, create a specialist (and thus patient) backlash, suffer from lack of agreement over measures and metrics, and drive up prices due to consolidation. These are legitimate concerns. But such concerns should not mean that the testing should slow down. Rather, in my view, it should accelerate, given some early positive results and the ongoing cost and quality challenges faced by our health care system.

Jump to Page

Privacy Preference Center

When you visit any website, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalized web experience. Because we respect your right to privacy, you can choose not to allow some types of cookies. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings. However, blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.

Performance Cookies

These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.